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something he had done a thousand times between warring corporations.
Every time he looked at Melanie, a constant smile curved across her face as she chatted and poured, the ache in his chest quadrupled. Need for her—not just sexual need, but an indefinable, untouchable need that ran bone-deep—stirred in his gut, rushing through his veins. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her to his chest and kiss her until he made this past year go away.
But deep in his heart he knew they’d gone way beyond the point where a simple kiss could solve anything.
“Dad,” Emmie said, coming over to him. Now a college sophomore, Emmie had the same heart-shaped face and delicate features as her mother, except now her hair was spiked, her lips painted a dark crimson.
“Sit at the counter. It’s way more comfortable.”
Before he could protest, his daughter had taken his cup of Kenyan roast and put it on the laminate surface. Three feet from Melanie. He and Melanie exchanged a quick, knowing glance.
Obviously she knew Emmie was trying to bring them together. Why shouldn’t she? Emmie hadn’t asked for the divorce and she’d made it clear she didn’t like alternating between her two parents’ homes for weekly dinners and occasional laundry stops, like a perpetual ping-pong game.
Cade sure as hell wasn’t happy watching his marriage whittle away, either.
He rose and crossed to the wooden bar, settling onto one of the cushioned stools. “You’ve created a nice place here.”
He hadn’t seen his wife in a year and that was the best he could come up with? This is nice?
After this, he was heading to the bookstore to see if there was a Resurrecting Your Marriage for Dummies. Because clearly this dummy was failing at Wooing Back a Wife 101.
“Thanks,” Melanie said. She wiped off the steamer spout, then tossed the dirty cloth into a bucket of laundry inside the kitchen. She washed her hands and picked up the rack of freshly baked cookies and began loading them into the glass case, arranging them as carefully as she used to arrange the pillows in their living room.
“Is it going well?” Cade asked. “From what I’ve seen, this place is as popular as an elf at Christmas.”
She laughed. “Things are going much better than expected.”
He heard the undertones of their last fight in those two sentences. Cade was smart enough to back away from that. “I’m happy for you, Melanie.”
Emmie brushed by him, giving him an elbow hint. “Say something, Dad,” she whispered.
Cade held up his hands and looked to Emmie for help. She gave him the duh look she’d perfected by her sixteenth birthday. Oh, yeah, he was the dad. He was supposed to have all the answers.
He did—all but this one.
Cade shifted on the stool. “Are you going to tease your hair and unearth that Kiss concert T-shirt for Friday night?”
She chuckled. “Oh gosh, that was a thousand years ago. I don’t think I saved the shirt.”
“You did. Bottom drawer, on the right.” He knew, because he’d been in their dresser after she’d left, looking for something, and come across the worn image of Gene Simmons. For a moment, Cade had been back there, in the thirtieth row, rocking along with Melanie as they held up a lighter during a ballad and sang along until their voices cracked.
“I remember that night,” she said softly, then shook her head and got busy with the cookies again. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I’m not going to the reunion. I’ll have to save the Aqua Net for another night.”
She’d tried to pass it off as a joke, but Cade wasn’t laughing. “Didn’t you just tell Jeannie you would go?” He gestured toward the phone. “I couldn’t help but overhear. Jeannie’s voice is like a bullhorn.”
“I only said yes to—”
“Get her off your back?” He chuckled, reaching for that light, easy feeling again. It seemed to flit in and out, as ungraspable as a moth. “I know the feeling. It’s why I said yes, too.”
Emmie headed into the back of the shop, to get supplies or something, Cade supposed. As soon as their daughter was out of earshot, Melanie stopped working on the cookies, leaned an arm over the glass case and glared at him. “Why did you tell Jeannie we were still together?”
“I think there’s still a chance to work this out. You don’t throw nineteen years away on a whim.”
“You think this was a whim?” She shook her head, then lowered her voice. “It was the hardest decision I have ever made.”
Hurt stabbed at his chest, thinking of how quickly she’d been gone, how fast she’d escaped her half of their life. “I doubt that.”
She let out a gust of frustration. “Sign the papers, Cade. It’s over.”
“No.” He slipped off the stool and came around to the back of the glass case. “I’m done catwalking around the issue, biding my time. Thinking all you needed was a little space. I want answers, Mel, a solution.” He drew within inches of her. “Tell me what went wrong so I can change it.”
She threw up her hands. “Our marriage isn’t a clock, Cade. You can’t replace a couple gears and call it good as new.”
“And you can’t just throw it out because you wanted a better model.”
“That isn’t why I left.” Melanie circled the counter and began wiping down the case’s glass with an ammonia-scented cleaner and a white cotton cloth. An old man snored lightly on the sofa across the room, the paper on his torso fluttering as his chest rose up and down. “We made a mistake,” she said under her breath. “Why can’t you just let it go?”
“Because I still love you.” The words tore from his throat, contained in his chest for so long, fenced in by a hope that grew dimmer with every day Melanie refused his calls, ignored his e-mails, refused his requests to talk.
She shook her head and when she did, he saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “You don’t even know me.”
I would if you’d give me a chance, he wanted to scream. Let me try again. Don’t take away the one rock I’ve always stood on.
Before he could say anything, the bell rang and a woman in a business suit strode into the small shop and up to the register. Emmie came out of the back, headed to the register and greeted the woman, but her attention, Cade knew, was half on her parents.
Melanie took out some of her frustrations on the glass case, scrubbing it until it gleamed like silver. As her left hand rose up to swipe away a smear, a glint caught Cade’s eye.
Her wedding ring.
The same plain gold band he’d slipped on her finger in the county courthouse nearly twenty years ago.
A wave of hope rose within him, but he held it back. Cade was nothing if not a practical man. His wife may still be wearing her ring, but she’d gone back to using her maiden name and hadn’t slept in his bed for over a year. A piece of jewelry didn’t mean anything.
And yet, he hoped like hell it did.
“Mellie,” he said, slipping into the habit of her nickname. He grabbed her hand, stopping her from cleaning the glass into oblivion. He lowered his voice and turned so that the customer—and Emmie—couldn’t see or overhear them. “Go with me to the reunion. Wear that T-shirt and that bright pink lipstick you used to love. Go back in time with me, for one night. We could go out to dinner first, talk—”
“About what, Cade?” A glimmer washed over the deep thunderstorm of green in her eyes. Behind them, Emmie watched out of the corner of her eye, her movements quiet and small as she finished the customer’s latte and poured the steamed milk into a paper cup emblazoned with the bright crimson Cuppa Life logo.
Melanie